Saturday, January 25, 2014

Olive Penguins

These were so cute that I just couldn't help myself. Plus I had a great excuse to make them since my daughter as been learning about penguins at her daycare. She was telling me all about how they watched "Happy Feet" the other day and then she came home w/ a paper penguin. I didn't know what it was at first until the whole Happy Feet discussion.

When I looked at the picture, I thought it looked hard, but I am butter when it comes to my kids. If they asked me to build the Great Wall of China, I wouldn't be able to help myself. My daughter wanted a penguin snack, so a penguin snack is what she was going to get. I'm such a sucker...

THE PIN: Cream cheese-stuffed olives made to look like penguins complete with carrot beaks and feet

Pic from http://homestead-and-survival.com/
WHAT YOU NEED:
Jumbo or extra large olives (these are the body)
Large or medium olives (the head)
Carrots (cut them up into circle slices)
Cream cheese (make sure it's soft! You'll thank yourself later!)
Toothpicks (I used the fancy, frilly ones... I'll explain later)
Ziploc bag

I had to buy the olives. I don't usually keep them on hand, but I should because my kids love to stick them on the tips of their fingers and bite them off. I'm sure my kids are the only children on the planet to ever come up with this brilliant idea. Unfortunately for my kids (and my ears), they end up chomping the end of their fingers half the time inevitably ending up with a banshee-like scream filling the house. That's probably why I don't keep them on hand. Okay, so olives, CHECK. Carrots: we do always have those. They're a staple. CHECK. Cream cheese: I don't keep this on hand because it gets moldy in my fridge when it gets shoved behind a gallon of milk or a tupper-ware full of leftover soup. So I bought that too. CHECK. (Side bar: make sure you soften it up first! Like leave it out on the counter or stove for an hour or so. Trust me, this is better!). Toothpicks: luckily, I had just hosted a party the weekend before, so I even had the fancy ones with the colored frills on the top. DOUBLE CHECK! Ziploc bag: well, yea. CHECK.

So you slice the jumbo/XL olives down one side, stuff the cream cheese in a baggie, nip off the corner of the baggie and squeeze it in the hole on the bottom. The olive puffs up and out and the white looks like the little penguin belly. I did all of those at once because they took the longest amount of time. My six-year-old did the olive heads. After you slice the carrots into little discs, you nip a little wedge out of each one. This kind of took a little bit of time too. I had to cut some of the mini wedges in half because they wouldn't fit into the olive heads. So once I did that, my daughter shoved the carrot wedge thingies into the "star side" of the medium sized olives (not the hole side). After that, you can assemble them pretty quickly. I just shoved the olive head onto the toothpick up to the frilly part (sideways, obviously, so it looks like a penguin head), then I put the olive body on next, and finally stabbed it into the carrot disc that had the little wedge missing (so they look like penguin feet). Since the frilly toothpicks were the only ones I had, I thought it would look dumb, but they looked like those penguins with the crazy hair.


My daughters had fun turning their heads different ways to make them seem like they were all looking different directions. I stuffed, and sliced, and stabbed for what seemed like forever, but the end result was so cute and so worth the look on my daughters face when she saw them. She was so excited. Here's what I ended up with.

Finished product
I put them on a silver baking sheet to make it look like they were on an ice-skating rink. We put goldfish around them too, but I failed to get a pic of that one.

Army of penguins
COST: $ Since the olives I got were on sale, I think I spent less than $10 on all of the ingredients. Even if I would have had to buy the carrots, I still would have been under that amount.

DO-ABILITY: +++ This one was kind of hard. And it takes so long. I think I spent about an hour and a half on them AND I had the help of my sweet little girls and the hubby. Granted, the "help" I was receiving from the smallish ones was not the kind of help I would have preferred, but it was help nonetheless.

THE LOW-DOWN: These turned out pretty cute, but they were a bit difficult to make. I guess I would say these are not for the amateur craft person/chef. The hardest part was making sure the cream cheese stayed where it was supposed to. When I did it, the cream cheese kept squeezing out of the bag in places where it wasn't supposed to squeeze out of. The original pin that I found didn't have the toothpicks in it, but I had seen them on another, similar pin, so I added them. That made putting them together SO much easier. The first pin I looked at had you just sticking them together with cream cheese (that doesn't work, by the way, unless you want it to look like the great penguin massacre). Definitely make your job easier and use the toothpicks, but make sure you use the frilly ones (so people can see them and don't try to break their teeth off biting into them), especially if you're giving them to little ones, like I did.

GOOD STUFF: They are cute little edible penguins, so the kids might really be excited to eat them... or not. See below for more on this. There are some parts that kids can help out with. I love when I find things to make that my kids can actually help with!

BAD STUFF: When I served these at my daughter's daycare, all the kids were SO excited about eating them... and then they wouldn't eat them. I guess their palates weren't ready for the sophistication of olive penguins. So although they are super cute, the little ones might not like them. My own children, of course, couldn't eat them fast enough, since they love olives, carrots AND cream cheese.

PIN OR BUST?: Okay... this isn't exactly a bust because technically it did work, but there were a couple of things... First, it was kind of a toughie. If you pin it, make sure you have at least an hour to get it done. It works, but there's lots of room for error and it is not for those who do not excel in culinary pursuits. Also, the audience for these is obviously children, but since they didn't go over so well at my daycare, I'm not sure all kids would eat them. They are, however, a pretty healthy snack, if you can get your kids to try them. On the plus side, they might encourage kids to eat them, since they're cute little edible penguins.

FINAL THOUGHTS: I think these would be so good if you used different flavors of cream cheese (like the chive kind). If you do that, however, it might be even less likely that kids would eat them. I also thought if you could somehow find smaller olives (or something?) you could put little penguin babies on the feet, like in the Happy Feet movie. Might be another fun thing for the kids. There are all kinds of fun things you could do with this... red pepper scarves? 

Happy Pinning!


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